Posted on February 15th, 2017

Bethany Koby, Founder and CEO at Technology Will Save Us (DIY technology kits for kids)

Sophia Dominguez, Founder and CEO at SVRF (the first search and discovery engine for VR content) and Founder at AllThingsVR (weekly curated newsletter highlighting top VR news)

David Rose, Founder and CEO at PRSONAS (interactive self-service holograms)

The first speaker, David @ PRSONAS spoke about their product which is a hologram persona that can serve as a greeter at retail stores: provide product information, financial guidance, intake of medical symptoms, etc. The greeter is a flat holographic image of a person in what David called 2 ½-d display.

The software behind the hologram can provide appropriate hand gestures, show videos, instruct users to input data on a tablet, etc.

David talked about how they have customized the image to avoid falling into the uncanny valley (close to human-looking so feels creepy) by modeling the image as a non-human character.

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Next, Sophia @ SVFR spoke about how her company is striving to become the common site for distribution of VR, #AR and #MR videos. She likened today for VR as the early 1990’s were for Yahoo, when distribution of web content was still in its infancy.

She talked about the barriers to widespread VR production. These include lack of universally available hardware to record VR, lack of editing tools, but most importantly, we don’t yet know how to tell a story taking advantage of the VR experience.

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Next, Bethany @TechnologyWillSaveUs spoke about how her company is creating kits for students to experiment in creating their own technology. The kits contain sensors, motors, etc. and are linked to a programming language on their web portal which is an extension of Scratch.

As an example she demonstrated a programmable wrist band that can react to motion, etc.

Bethany then talked about their company strategy which emphasizes a range of products.

Create a range of products: variety of prices, can create bundled products

Product-market-fit: hardware is more difficult, so put development is on a tight production schedules with lots of feedback. Monitor ROI for various products.

By having a range of product, there are activities for all parts of the company at any given time.

She talked about how the company strives to stay ahead of the competitions (Little Bits, Lego Mindstorms) by carefully target price points and creating a wide range of products for different age groups.

Finally, John @Canary talked about their stand-alone, in-home security system which is connected to an app on your phone.

He emphasized the importance of Product design = Relationship design

You need

Quality time – the app needs to interactive. They made it easier to access the time line of videos taken by the system

Crisis management – can contact the police if there is a notification – help the homeowner overcome a crisis: the assist the home-owner filing an insurance claim.

A little magic – surprise and delight. Good example is Netflix onboarding that asks for your movie preferences then starts recommending movies upon the first use.

John also mentioned that they store videos of arrivals and departures, temperature, air quality, how active are occupants. Videos are stored 24 hours or 1 month depending on the contract. They are partnering with insurance companies to get homeowner discounts for using Canary.